The Baddest Girl on the Planet

by Heather Frese

  “ ‘For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain,’ ” Dr. John quotes. I know he’s quoting the Bible because he uses his special Bible-quoting voice, soft and precise. He stands in front of Aunt Fay’s coffin in his preacher robe. “When I speak this verse, I can’t help but think of Fay.” Dr. John talks about the Apostle Paul and how he was in prison, chained to a Roman soldier as his guard. I wonder where they were chained. Ankles? Wrists? “Like Paul, Fay lived the last years of her life a prisoner to a body filled with sickness, yet she never complained.” Dr. John has an earnest face. It looks like he truly believes this.

  Mom wails. I glance at Nate. His mouth twitches. Aunt Fay was many things, but uncomplaining was not one of them. “Get that godforsaken blood pressure cuff off me,” were her second-to-last words.

  Dr. John lays his hand on his Bible. “Fay, like Paul, seemed to rejoice in her affliction.”

  This time Nate snorts. He turns it into a cough and covers his mouth with his hand. He squints. Mom shakes her head back and forth into my shoulder, sobbing in little heh heh puffs.

  Dr. John talks about how the death of a Christian is a wonderful thing. “The problem is, we don’t believe that,” he says. Dr. John leans forward on his pulpit. “We think of death as some hideous monster come to cut off all our joys.”

  Austin sits up straight. He stops singing under his breath. Mom’s weeping dials down a notch until she’s just resting on my shoulder, breathing through her mouth.

  “We live in a cruel world, and so when death comes to take us to the Loo-ard where we shall have perfect health, wouldn’t you say that death is a friend?”

  Austin’s mouth moves again, but this time it’s because he’s chewing on his lip. He grabs my arm, then climbs onto my lap. I can’t move.

  Dr. John goes on, telling us how wonderful death is, and how God will give us all his beloved sleep one day. I wonder how I’m supposed to get any beloved sleep tonight when all I can think about is putting Aunt Fay’s body under six feet of sandy earth tomorrow morning. The Aunt Fay in my head turns to me and winks. “You know what the opposite of death is, right?” she asks. “Death with his hooded black cape and sensual bony fingers?”

  “Life?” I ask her back.

  “Hah!” She pokes me in the ribs. “Sex.”

  I wonder if she’s right. I wonder if being naked will disintegrate my Grief Bubble, or if an orgasm will. I think of Royce.

  Chapter 7: Leave-taking. The funeral guest should keep in mind that mourners have just put in a full eight-hour day of public grieving. Lingering is inappropriate. Take heed when the funeral home stops playing sad, sad organ music. This is generally a leave-taking cue.

  I wander around the funeral home waiting for the last stragglers to leave so I can go home and get Austin settled. I extract my phone and send Royce a message. “I’ve missed your Buddha belly.” He sends one back. “The lucky Buddha’s missed you.” I write, “Thanks for the flowers. I used to only get them after sex.” Royce responds, “I could bring you roses in the morning.” I put my phone away and go over to the coffin. The Grief Bubble, which had gotten less sticky as I messaged Royce, circles back over me like a veil. I stand over Aunt Fay and wonder who selected the pink satin coffin liner. At least they didn’t put her in a pink satin dress. Aunt Fay wears a nice pantsuit that is neither pastel nor polyester. I study her body. The caved-in jaw from cancer surgery. The gnarled hands. The short legs beneath the half-open coffin. She looks doughy, too soft, which is strange since she’s probably in rigor mortis. I think again that this isn’t my aunt. This isn’t Fay.

  “She was my family,” my dad says, putting his arm around me. “She raised me.” He pats my hair like I’m a kid, and it feels nice.

  “I know,” I say. “I know, Daddy.”

  Mom comes over and stands beside Dad. They hold hands. Charlotte and Austin walk up. Nate ushers the last straggler out, then takes the empty spot in front of the coffin. He picks up Austin. “Do you want to say goodbye to Aunt Fay?” Nate asks.

  Austin doesn’t answer. I don’t think he wants to. I don’t think any of us do.

  Walter leaves three turds on my bedroom floor. “Thanks for that,” I tell him. I flush the turds, wash my hands, and go back to my room. I’ve just gotten Austin to bed, and I hope the flushing doesn’t wake him. Walter’s asleep on my pillow. He lifts his head, then settles it back down on his front paws. I’m trying to decide what to wear to Royce’s. Black panties—morbid or sexy? Charlotte knocks and sticks her head in my bedroom.

  “I brought you some tea,” she says. She sets a mug on my dresser.

  I sit down on the bed and pet Walter. He opens one eye, then goes back to sleep. Charlotte sits beside me. “Can you listen for Austin tonight?” I ask. This shouldn’t be too much of an imposition since Charlotte’s sleeping in Austin’s top bunk bed.

  “Of course,” she says.

  I lift Walter, pillow and all, to the other side of me in case he wakes up and decides to get cranky. “I think I might have inherited a dog,” I say.

  “Maybe you could get on that dog whispering show.” Charlotte stretches her legs out on the bed and leans back on her elbows. She opens her mouth to say something else, but just then a scream from Austin’s room rips through the air. We both jump up and run in.

  Austin sits with a rigid spine and screams and screams. It sounds like he’s just been stabbed. “Baby, what’s wrong?” I climb in bed and pull him into my arms. Charlotte sits and massages Austin’s feet.

  Austin stops screaming. He sobs instead. I don’t know which is worse. “It’s Skeletor,” he says. His body shakes.

  “How do you know about Skeletor?” I don’t let him watch that junk.

  “Dad and I watched it.” Austin’s face is red. His lip trembles and his hair sticks on his forehead in sweaty strips. He clutches his Batman comforter in both hands. “Skeletor’s coming to take me. He said so.”

  I smooth his hair, kiss the top of his head. I rub his back and straighten his blue pajamas.

  “Skeletor’s just pretend,” Charlotte says. “He’s a drawing. He can’t hurt you.”

  Austin shakes his head. “He’s coming.”

  I rock him back and forth, back and forth. His small body collapses my Grief Bubble, and I’m flooded with the sharp pain of today until my chest literally hurts. Or maybe the Grief Bubble doesn’t collapse. Maybe my Grief Bubble and Austin’s merge.

  Epilogue: It is the bereaved’s ultimate challenge and responsibility to comfort fellow bereaved persons. Especially if the fellow bereave-ee is your son.

  “Don’t let him take me,” Austin says. He clings to my waist.

  I hold Austin’s face in my hands. “No one’s taking you. I promise.” I hug him and cry into his hair. His body shakes against mine; mine shakes against his. We fit tightly together, me and this small body that was once part of my own.

  Charlotte and I stay with Austin until everyone calms down. We put him in pajamas with Transformers on them since Transformers can beat up Skeletor any day of the week. We sing songs and read an old picture book that’s too easy and drink warm milk, and finally Austin falls asleep. I smooth his hair one last time, and Charlotte and I slip back to my room.

  I close the door softly and lean against it. “Thanks for helping,” I say. I’m shaken. Austin hasn’t freaked out like that since Stephen left. My phone’s blinking on the dresser, and I sit down on the bed to read a message from Royce. “This little Buddha’s ready to be enlightened.”

  Charlotte picks up the now-cold mug of tea. “That’s why I’m here,” she says. Then she sets the tea down. “If you need to go see Royce, I can take care of Austin if he wakes up. I’ll be right there in his room.”

  Part of me wants to run out the door. To be anywhere but here, thinking of anything but death and burials and Skeletor. I stand up. “How does anyone ever figure this out?” I ask.

  Charlotte shakes her head. “There are no rules,” she says.

  I nod.
I put on my slippers and turn off my phone, then pick up my mug of tea. We pass Austin’s room and walk down the hall to the microwave in the kitchen.

  Six

  Bad Dog

  Walter is a bad dog. A Yorkshire terrorist. He: Pees on the floor. Runs away. Bites.

  But he doesn’t just bite. Walter: Waits until you’re half-asleep, snuggled up with him on the sofa, watching Travel Channel, then turns and snaps at the remote.

  He: Sneaks out of the house, running up and down the side of Highway 12 during ferry traffic so you have to chase after him with a butterfly net.

  Walter pees on: New carpet; new shoes; real hardwood floors. He pees on the sofa you use to watch the Travel Channel; the bed; the ottoman your parents imported from Turkey. He pees on other dogs.

  A brief story: You take Walter to the Petco in Manteo. He prances up and down the aisles like a prince, shiny black fur swinging. Then he shits on the floor. You’re pricing Greenies and don’t notice the small pile of excrement until an unsuspecting fellow shopper carrying a bejeweled shih tzu slips on it and falls to the floor. Walter, taking this as a territory challenge, lifts his leg and pees on the puzzled shih tzu, soaking its leopard-print tutu. The owner, whose J.Crew cotton-polyester jacket is now smeared with Walter-shit, is understandably offended. At this juncture, Walter curls his lip in an Elvis snarl and attacks her leather Coach handbag, which has been discarded during the poop-induced fall. He snarls and shakes and shreds and scatters. When management asks you to leave in lieu of calling the police, you and Walter politely comply, but before exiting the sliding-glass door, Walter succeeds in appropriating a catnip-filled toy shaped like a radish. You’re too humiliated to return it to the store; besides, Walter growls fiendishly when you approach said radish. You decide to let him keep it. The radish does not leave his mouth for two days.

  Seven

  Postpartum

  — 2009 —

  You know you’ve lost it when you start writing letters to Dear Abby.

  Dear Abby,

  I look at my baby’s squalling red face and I want to run away. What do I do?

  Horrible in Hatteras

  When the paper boy thunks the Outer Banks Sentinel against your door at seven in the morning, you go straight to the comics and TV listings, hoping Dear Abby will enlighten you. But she never responds. You have a birth certificate that says you’re a mother. Austin Charles Oden. You look on the back for instructions, but there are none. You feel like the only horrible, unprepared mother in the universe. Your son cries, and for a minute, you pretend you don’t hear him, scanning the page for your horoscope. You’re pretty sure you’ve lost it when you read it and think, legitimately think, that the stars have aligned so you can leave:

  Family members could be upset over frustrating events in their lives, and these moods could spill over to you. Today it would be best to leave them alone to work things out in their own way.

  For the four days you’ve been home from the hospital, your mother has left your dad to handle things at the inn and come over to your little white house on Elizabeth Lane every morning. She arrives just after the Sentinel, and just after Stephen leaves to work in his father’s hardware store. She comes grudgingly, but she comes. She’s so efficient it’s terrifying, changing your baby’s diaper with quick, clean motions, handing him to you to feed. You press the baby to your breast, but he won’t eat. You poke your nipple into his mouth. He won’t take it. He’s never taken it without a fight. He cries, his tiny face bunching and crinkling, pink mouth open in a howl that pierces your eardrums. He wails. He screams. He flails his tiny fists. Your incompetence burbles in your chest. You think he senses this and doesn’t want to drink incompetent breast milk. Your mom sighs and takes the baby from you, jiggling him up and down.

  You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve never even had a dog.

  You live on this scrawny, unprotected spit of sand between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pamlico Sound. A flat, sandy, cactus-ridden prison. You’d just escaped to college on the mainland, just fallen in love with biology and Shakespeare and Stephen Oden, who was even cuter in college than he was in high school, when you got pregnant. Most Likely to Get Knocked Up and Move Back Home might as well have been written in your high school yearbook. You lived up to your reputation. Easy Evie. You say it out loud as you stare down at your sleeping son, at his placid face and twitching baby fingers. His tiny nose encrusted with a fine, translucent rim of dried snot; his patchy, alien-scaled scalp.

  What to Expect When You’re Expecting never said that motherhood would feel like punishment, like solitary confinement. Your best friend, Charlotte, stayed with you while you were pregnant, but now she’s gone back to college. All your friends have. Even the tourists are gone.

  The baby wakes up, his eyes blinking and unfocused. He twists, writhes, and then the screaming starts. You pick him up. You spend your day bouncing, shushing, swinging, swaying—an odd combination of busyness and tedium. You try to sleep when he sleeps, like all the books say, but every time you close your eyes you see tiny limbs, umbilical stumps, and wide-open, screaming mouths. Empty. Waiting to be fed.

  Stephen comes home, and it’s as if you’re looking at his high cheekbones and pale eyes through a sheer, gray film. He’s covered, blurred, like everything else. When he takes over swaying duty, you hunker in the upstairs office and call Charlotte.

  “I don’t recognize myself,” you tell her.

  “I think I’m going to join a sorority,” she says.

  You write another letter to Dear Abby:

  Dear Abby,

  I made a mistake. I’m not ready to be a mother. I want things to go back to the way they were. What do I do?

  Regretful in Hatteras

  You don’t mean to, but that night you fall asleep with the baby in bed beside you. You wake up sweating, trapped between your husband and your son, unable to move, your body pinned between theirs. You weasel yourself out of the covers and put the baby in his crib, sliding your arms out from beneath his body with glacial slowness, then go to the bathroom and stare at yourself in the mirror. You weren’t kidding when you told Charlotte you didn’t recognize yourself. Puffy-faced, dark-circled, greasy-haired. The baby starts to cry, but you sit down to pee anyway. You’re still bleeding.

  Dear Abby counsels a lazy husband, an excessive shopper, and a woman concerned with sneezing etiquette. By the time your mother stops by, you know you’re required to say bless you out of politeness, even if you don’t believe that her soul, in sneezing, leaves her body and is in danger of getting devil-snatched.

  Your mom rocks the baby’s cradle, a gift from her and your dad. It’s yellow with a pattern of dancing elephants. Some of the elephants carry red umbrellas. Has he eaten?

  You stare out the window at a lone puff of cloud in the glorious September sky. Even through the haze that films everything, you can tell the sky is stunning, the sort of blue-sky day you used to love to be outside in. The whiteness of the little cloud feathers out against the cerulean in a cotton ball puff, its edges ragged. You don’t know why, but the cloud makes you teary-eyed. You blame it on sleep deprivation. “All he does is scream,” you say. You’ve tried to feed him three times this morning, and he won’t eat.

  As if to back you up, the baby stirs and begins to cry, softly and staccato at first, then with loud, sustained, throaty wails. Your mom rocks and hushes, pats and sways. “Try to feed him,” she says, handing you the baby.

  You unsnap your nursing bra and poke your nipple into his mouth. He roots around and latches on, sucking and smacking. His nose is running, and snot gets on your breast.

  “He was hungry,” your mom says. She leans over and pats the baby’s head, her long, dark hair falling into her face like a curtain.

  Again, you feel like an idiot. “How did you ever learn to do this?” “I didn’t have a choice,” she says. She looks up and pushes her hair behind her ear. “I didn’t have my mother to teach me.”

  You�
�ve never really thought about the fact that your mom’s mom died before your brother and you were born. You think about it now. You feed the baby and cry.

  That afternoon you realize that, ironically, you’ve run out of milk. Cow milk. Milk for cereal and coffee and macaroni and cheese. You put on your maternity jeans and load your breasts into a jacket and head out the door to the Burrus Red and White grocery. You start the car and back halfway down the driveway before realizing you forgot the baby. You sit and think about driving away. Up Highway 12, across the Bonner Bridge, past Nags Head and Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills to someplace on the mainland, someplace where your breasts could shrink to their normal size; where you could chop off your hair and change your name and start over. You could be a diner waitress, the mysterious woman with a shrouded past who ends up falling in love with the handsome town mechanic.

  Dear Abby,

  What’s the most inconspicuous fake name one can adopt?

  Ready to Run in NC

  You turn off the car and haul yourself and your breasts back inside. The baby is quiet, and you’re stabbed with the thought that he died while you were in the driveway. You run to the nursery, but he’s just sleeping, tiny chest rising and falling inside his blue onesie. You think about what you’ll need to take with you and pack it in a bag. Change of clothes in case he poops himself. Diaper. Wipes. Diaper cream. Changing pad. Powder. Ointment for circumcised baby weenie. Plastic bag to put dirty diaper in. Pacifier. Blanket. Rattle, even though he doesn’t care about toys yet. You heft the bag onto your shoulder and head to the car. This time you only make it to the porch before you remember the baby’s still inside.